Nigerian separatist guerrillas, who are holding three western oil workers as hostages, shot dead five government soldiers in a firefight in the Niger Delta, a military spokesman has said today.
Navy spokesman Captain Obiora Medani confirmed to AFP that four
army troops and one paramilitary policeman had been shot dead in Wednesday’s gunbattle on the Escravos River, 300 kilometres (185 miles) southeast of Lagos. Meanwhile, Nigerian army spokesman Colonel Mohammed Yusuf said that three more soldiers had been wounded, adding: “Our soldiers killed some of the militants in the exchange of fire … about three or four of them were killed.” The rebels claimed the battle erupted when their boats were attacked by the military, but Medani said the gang had tried to capture a vessel carrying fuel upriver and were driven off when government forces responded.
“Militants were trying to seize a barge carrying refined petroleum –perhaps to sell — and were caught in the act. They were repulsed,” he said. A rebel spokesman claimed that 13 government soldiers had been
killed and warned that his group’s hostages, two Americans and a Briton, “are endangered by such experiments carried out by the Nigerian army.” The kidnappers, in a statement from the group’s email address, said that at 5:15pm (1615 GMT) rebel “patrols on the Escravos River were attacked in the vicinity of Okerenkoko by four patrol boats belonging to the Nigerian army.” Okerenkoko is an ethnic Ijaw town 30 kilometres (19 miles) west of the port of Warri and is thought to be where a group known as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) is holding the foreign oilmen.
The rebel spokesman wrote that the hostages “are kept not exactly at the point of confrontation, but are in that vicinity. The military will be in a better position to confirm their reasons for this poorly planned assault.”
He said that once the firefight had broken out three more army boats arrived and joined battle with the guerrillas, who are armed with rocket propelled grenades and belt-fed machineguns. “There was a firefight, which lasted about 45 minutes,” he said.
On February 18, several boatloads of MEND fighters attacked the energy giant Shell’s huge Forcados oil export terminal, fought a gunbattle with navy troops and set fire to a tanker loading platform. During the attack they stormed a pipeline laying barge operated for Shell by the US engineering firm Willbros and kidnapped nine foreign workers. Six have since been released, but three more — US oilmen Cody Oswald and Russel Spell and British security expert John Hudspith — are still being held while the government tries to negotiate their release through intermediaries.
Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil exporter, producing 2.6 million barrels per day, but has been forced to cut output by around 20 percent since the start of the latest round of violence. Many among the Niger Delta’s 14-million-strong Ijaw tribe believe their region’s oil wealth has been stolen by corrupt Nigerian officials and foreign oil majors, and several militant
groups operate on the delta creeks. In a separate incident at the other, eastern end of the delta, protesters briefly besieged the US major ExxonMobil’s Qua Iboe export terminal to protest againsy pollution and demand jobs and local investment, the firm said.
“The youths came in some buses and set a barricade … Movement of staff was restricted for some 30 minutes,” a company spokesman said. “Representatives from an organisation called the Movement for the Survival of Ethnic Nationalities in the Niger Delta held a peaceful rally outside. There were no injuries or impact on operations,” he added. Despite Nigeria having earned more than 300 billion dollars from oil exports since 1956, three-quarters of the 130 million people in Africa’s most populous still live in grinding poverty on less than a dollar per day.